


Morpho Aurora Aureola

by whitachi



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:37:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Cid Bunansa, Ffamran's mother, and the amazing clockwork butterflies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morpho Aurora Aureola

Archades was not home to many forms of insect life. The climate was too cold and the damp too perpetual for much more but the hardiest of ugly beetles, worms, and other such that one might find in an overturned rock. It was because of this that Dr. Cid had to importfor at least, in Archades, if you could not find it, you could always find someone willing to procure it for you for the proper price. 

It was the boy's mother (although there was not yet a boy, and she was not yet a mother) who had driven him to this end, haggling with an importer over the price of a box full of pins, and velvet, and many things that had once been alive. That woman, who kept turning up at every dreaded official function he was compelled to attend, with her dark dresses, her dark hair, her dark eyes. She seemed to be around every corner, waiting to smile at him. 

"Dr. Bunansa, isn't that it?" she had said to him as she pressed a glass of wine into his hand, her thumb making sure to press into the base of his palm. Something in her accent was foreign, some shape of vowels or some sibilance held too long. But everything of that woman was foreignthe parts of her skin her dresses would gap to show, the smell of her hair as she leaned in close, the volume of her laugh, and the shine of her eyes, that gleaming blue of a butterfly's wing. 

"Yes, that is it," he told her, and put the wine aside. "But it is also Cid." 

Cid had no patience for the trappings of courtship, and never had; he had little patience for most _people_ , so he left the flowers and flirtations for them, and kept to his work. But she moved in an ever-shrinking orbit around him; at the edge of his vision, and even when he closed his eyes, that woman was there. At the palace, in his laboratory, in his own workshop, she was there, listening, smiling, bending to see the details of his blueprints and to let him see the crossing of veins beneath her pale throat. Something had to be done, and that, that is why he paid far too much for a box imported from an odd collector in Rozarria. 

He had far from intended it to be a romantic evening, but there were some things, such as Archades' propensity towards warm spring evenings with beautiful starlight, that were as yet beyond his control. He sat with her on an open balcony beneath a waxing moon, and presented to her a small box. 

"Cid, you shouldn't" she began, and he tutted and placed the box in her hand. It fit her palm perfectly. 

"Do not speak such just yet. Open it." 

Her smirk showed just a hint of teeth, and she pushed back the hinge of the box. Her expression, Cid was satisfied to see, was one of surprise. 

"A... butterfly?" she said, and tilted the box to catch light on the shimmering blue wings. Cid reached within to press a finger to the center of the insect's body, where a small switch lay. The tiny gears and springs that he had spent late nights piecing together whirred into life, and the clockwork butterfly's honest wings fluttered to bring it into the air, shimmering in flight before the woman. "It's beautiful," she breathed, as it dipped in slow circles before her eyes. 

"Yes, it is," Cid said, but he looked only at the reflection of the butterfly that lit in her eyes. "And there are a dozen more waiting for you, ready at a switch to fly for you." He took the empty box from her hands, as the butterfly whirred in a circle about them. He spoke deliberately. "I have made them to be beautiful for you." He close her hand within his, feeling her thumb press to the base of his palm. "And they will never die... just, perhaps, required a bit of winding." 

And he wound the butterflies for her every night as she slept, careful not to disturb the colors of the wings brought to him from all corners of Ivalice. He kept the clockwork oiled and running in the nights of the boy's infancy, when his cries drew them both from their bed. He replaced the wings of a few when the boy became older, and his bright curiosity had lead to broken gears, iridescent color smeared on small fingers, and tears that Cid wiped away. 

Sometime in the boy's third year, his mother left them both, taking with her a collection of his inventions, and most of his blueprints. He never bothered winding the butterflies again. 

[ ](http://www.insectlabstudio.com/index.php/item/287)


End file.
